Johnny McLean’s thoughts leaped in time with his steps as they marched away.  And once or twice a terror seized him—­for he was weak yet from his illness—­that he was going to make “a fool of himself.”  He remembered how the girl had cried; he thought of the way the boys had loaded him with honor and affection; he heard the president’s voice speaking those impossible words about him—­ about him—­and he would have given a large sum of money at one or two junctures to bolt and get behind a locked door alone where he might cry as the girl had.  But the unsentimental hilarity all around saved him and brought him through without a stain on his behavior.  Only he could not bolt—­he could not get a moment to himself for love or money.  It was for love he wanted it.  He must find her—­he could not wait now.  But he had to wait.  He had to go into the country to dinner with them all and be lionized and made speeches at, and made fun of, and treated as the darling child and the pride and joy and—­what was harder to bear—­as the hero and the great man of the class.  All the time growing madder with restlessness, for who could tell if she might not be leaving town!  A remnant of the class ahead crossed them—­ and there was Brant, her brother.  Diplomacy was not for Johnny McLean—­he was much too anxious.

“Brant, look here,” and he drew him into a comparative corner.

“Where is she?” Brant did not pretend not to understand, but he grinned.

“At the Andersons’, of course.”

“Now?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Fellows,” said Johnny McLean, “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to sneak.  I’m going back to town.”

Sentences and scraps of sentences came flying at him from all over. 
“Hold him down”—­“Chain him up”—­“Going—­tommy-rot—­can’t go!”
“You’ll be game for the roundup at eleven—­you’ve got to be.” 
“Our darling boy—­he’s got to be,” and more language.

“All right for eleven,” Johnny agreed.  “I’ll be at head-quarters then—­but I’m going now,” and he went.

He found her in a garden, which is the best place to make love.  Each place is the best.  And in some mystical manner all the doubt and unhappiness which had been gone over in labored volumes of thoughts by each alone, melted to nothing, at two or three broken sentences.  There seemed to be nothing to say, for everything was said in a wordless, clear mode of understanding, which lovers and saints know.  There was little plot to it, yet there was no lack of interest.  In fact so light-footed were the swift moments in the rose-scented dark garden that Johnny McLean forgot, as others have forgotten before him, that time was.  He forgot that magnificent lot of fellows, his classmates; there was not a circumstance outside of the shadowy garden which he did not whole-heartedly forget.  Till a shock brought him to.